r his practice is the oftquoted caution of
Horace, _Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere_.

But the seventeenth century was not disposed to continue uninterruptedly
the tradition of previous translators. In translated, as in original
verse a new era was to begin, acclaimed as such in its own day, and
associated like the new poetry, with the names of Denham and Cowley as
both poets and critics and with that of Waller as poet. Peculiarly
characteristic of the movement was its hostility towards literal
translation, a hostility apparent also, as we have seen, in Chapman. "I
consider it a vulgar error in translating poets," writes Denham in the
preface to his _Destruction of Troy_, "to affect being Fidus Interpres,"
and again in his lines to Fanshaw:

That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word, and line by line.
Those are the labored births of slavish brains,
Not the effect of poetry but pains;
Cheap, vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.

Sprat is anxious to claim for Cowley much of the credit for introducing
"this way of leaving verbal translations and chiefly regarding the sense
and genius of the author," which "was scarce heard of in England before
this present age."[394]

Why Chapman and later translators should have fixed upon extreme
literalness as the besetting fault of their predecessors and
contemporaries, it is hard to see. It is true that the recognition of
the desirability of faithfulness to the original was the most
distinctive contribution that sixteenth-century critics made to the
theory of translation, but this principle was largely associated with
prose renderings of a different type from that now under discussion.
If, like Denham, one excludes "matters of fact and matters of faith,"
the body of translation which remains is scarcely distinguished by
slavish adherence to the letter. As a matter of fact, however,
sixteenth-century translation was obviously an unfamiliar field to most
seventeenth-century commentators, and although their generalizations
include all who have gone before them, their illustrations are usually
drawn from the early part of their own century. Ben Jonson, whose
translation of Horace's _Art of Poetry_ is cited by Dryden as an
example of "metaphrase, or turning an author word by word and line by
line from one language to another,"[395] is perhaps largely responsible
for the mistaken impr